What's happening., December 10, 1987, Image 1

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Chagdud Tulku Rinpoche:
Meditation Master
BY MARILYN COHEN
A WARM SMILE IS THE FIRST IMPRESSION
of Chagdud Tulku Rinpoche. Visiting with him
is a little like visiting a favorite uncle—one
who takes great delight in seeing you. Yet it
is no ordinary visit with an ordinary person.
Chagdud Tulku Rinpoche is a highly revered
Tibetan Buddhist lama. He is a meditation
master, a physician and healer, an artist, and
perhaps most important of all, an extraor
dinary teacher to many of us in the Eugene
area.
Chagdud Tulku was the head of Chagdud
Gonpa, the second oldest monastery in
Eastern Tibet, when he was forced to flee by
the invading Chinese in 1959. For the next
20 years, he worked tirelessly for the welfare
of Tibetan refugees in various settlements in
India and Nepal, doing whatever he could to
meet their needs on both a material and
spiritual level. He was also widely renowned
for his healing abilities.
While in Nepal this past summer, I had the
good fortune to meet a Tibetan family who
had been in the refugee camp that Rinpoche
headed in India. They expressed deep devo
tion, respect and admiration for Rinpoche.
The husband and wife were only 14 when
they arrived in the camp in 1959. Rinpoche
provided them with spiritual training and
guidance, established a rug factory where
they and the other Tibetans were able to
work, and ministered to them when they
were ill. In short, as they put it. Rinpoche
"made life possible" for them.
After working with the refugees, Chagdud
Tulku came to California in 1979. A year
later, he moved to Oregon and established
his residence and principal center in Cottage
Grove, where he has been accessible to
many people. Rinpoche travels and teaches
widely in the United States, Europe and
Asia—he has students in England, Switzer
land, Hong Kong, Malaysia, Australia, Canada
as well as the U.S. In addition, he offers
meditation training retreats in Oregon and at
Ati Ling, his new retreat center near Napa,
California.
So often we tend to overlook the precious
ness of people who are so close to us. Re
cently, this point was brought home to me
when I met a Swiss woman at one of
Chagdud Tulku’s teachings. She had been
studying in Nepal and had asked one of the
lamas there where she could get the highest
teachings of the Nyingma school—one of the
four schools of Tibetan Buddhism. He recom
mended one lama in Kathmandu and
Chagdud Tulku Rinpoche, in Cottage Grove,
Oregon. She then travelled halfway around
the world to become one of Chagdud Rin
poche's students.
Chagdud Tulku was born in 1930 and
spent his formative years in Eastern Tibet.
Many great lamas enriched Rinpoche's train
ing in his early years. His own mother had
extraordinary powers and was one of Tibet’s
most famous female lamas. Under the guid
ance of his teachers he made his first three
year retreat when he was nine years old,
and a second one when he was 22. Through
out his life, Rinpoche has continued to make
retreats and has engaged in extensive medi
tative practices.
The purpose of meditation, as Chagdud
Rinpoche has often taught, is to reveal the
true nature of our minds. We all have innate
wisdom and compassion, but just as the sky
is covered by clouds, our wisdom-com
passion is covered by our ordinary thoughts
and emotions. The point of meditation is to
remove our obscurations and attain unob
structed awareness. With that unobstructed
awareness comes unobstructed compassion.
We see the basic predicament of all beings
and develop unlimited compassion for them.
Continued on page 20